“How dangerous is it to fly in your little plane” or “is it more dangerous than driving” is one of the more common questions I get from a person who just found out I’m a pilot and I’m guessing all you other pilots out there get roughly the same questions. Of course you will run into the people who are more supporting and just say “that’s awesome, I always wanted to be a pilot” but there’s always someone that will point out safety concerns. I think this is the time to go into the math of it and what you can do to make it safer for you and your passengers.
How Dangerous Is A Small Plane Relative To Other Vehicles?
It’s hard to compare these but I’ll use some estimations in an attempt to make this as accurate as possible. I’m going to go with the most common long distance transportation options; Airlines, Cars, Motorcycles, Trains and Busses vs your everyday 4 seater Cessna, Piper or Mooney. I won’t be looking at accident rates since most people want to know if they are going to die, not if they will get in a fender bender or have an emergency landing story to tell their friends.
Cars/Trucks Death Rates
This is a little hard to estimate against a plane because planes use flight hours vs miles but we can do some quick translations. The average speed of a car in the US is about 25MPH but I’m going to be gracious since this is including stop and go city traffic and I’ll say 50MPH. With a 2022 death rate of 1.38 per 100 million miles this indicates that in those 100,000,000 miles they drove for 2,000,000 hours. With 1.38 deaths per 2,000,000 hours, we have a good comparison now.
Motorcycle
I love my motorcycle and try to ride it as much as possible in good road conditions and during the day because it’s more dangerous. There are a lot of different sources our there for this but it tends to be about 20X the rate of cars. The Insurance information Institute calculated this to be 31.64 deaths per 100,000,000 miles. I’ll use the same 50MPH since we are all on the road together and say this is 31.64 deaths/2,000,000 miles.
Airliner
This is easy, in 2022 there were 0 deaths with a commercial airline and in 2023 there was one turboprop which crashed with 78 deaths. Either way with millions of flights per year this makes the calculation as close to zero as possible. This will surely be close to the safest way to travel.
Small Planes
Let’s get to it, the answer that many of your more annoying friends significant others will ask. How dangerous is flying a small plane. 1.57 deaths per 100,000 which if normalized to our 2,000,000 hour baseline would be 31.4 deaths per 2,000,000 hours.
Conclusion
Motorcycles are more dangerous than Small Planes but just by a little bit, cars are very safe and in no surprise Airlines are the safest. Check out some reasons small planes crash and what can be done to reduce the risk in Why Are Small Planes Crashing. The most important thing to remember is about 70% of plane crashes are pilot related like flying into bad weather or running out of gas so the rate can be more than halved for those who stick to checklists, prepare and don’t fall pray to the 5 hazardous attitudes (Macho, Invulnerability, Resignation, Anti-Authority and Impulsivity).
